Article

The connection between the Hikayat Raja2 Pasai and the Sejarah Melayu

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The connection between the Hikayat Raja2 Pasai and the Sejarah Melayu

P. L. Amin Sweeney’s 1967 article in the Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society re-examines the long-debated question of the textual relationship between the Hikayat Raja-Raja Pasai (HRP) and the Sejarah Melayu (SM), challenging both Winstedt’s thesis of HRP priority and Teeuw’s more recent counter-argument. Working from the sole extant manuscript (Raffles MS 67, dated 1814) and comparative linguistic analysis, Sweeney argues that the evidence supports a direct textual connection between the two works but resists simple conclusions about direction of influence, proposing instead a complex scenario of revision and interpolation spanning the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries.

Summary

Sweeney’s central intervention is methodological: he subjects the linguistic and stylistic evidence marshalled by Winstedt and Hill for the HRP’s antiquity to close scrutiny and finds it largely unconvincing. Winstedt’s “archaic” vocabulary—kutaha, nentiasa, penah, kendiri, mangkin, bepersembahkan—is shown to survive well into the seventeenth and even nineteenth centuries, and the manuscript’s own orthographic variants (otiose alif, medda, nasalization patterns) are consistent with seventeenth-century Acehnese usage rather than fifteenth-century composition. Sweeney further demonstrates that the HRP is not a stylistically unified text but contains at least three distinct registers, undermining Hill’s claim that it “produced the first distinct Malay literary style.” The shared motifs between the HRP and later Malay histories (the Bamboo Princess, dying injunctions, place-name aetiology) are shown to have independent sources in the Hikayat Seri Rama, the Hikayat Iskandar Zulkarnain, and oral tradition, rather than flowing from the HRP as a single fountainhead.

Having dismantled the case for HRP priority on linguistic grounds, Sweeney then turns to the passages where verbal similarity between the HRP and the SM is genuinely striking. He accepts that a direct written connection exists—oral transmission in fixed form is implausible for the degree of overlap—but argues that the direction cannot be settled by the “plausibility” criterion Teeuw favours. Instead, he points to specific linguistic markers: the use of ia for rulers, the word sabda in royal context, and the verb ujar all appear in the SM exclusively within the Pasai section, suggesting that the SM’s compiler borrowed from a text using these forms. Sweeney then introduces a complicating hypothesis: the HRP may itself have been revised after the Acheh conquest of Pasai in 1524, with certain passages (the Perlak marriage, the war against Siam) altered to counter the SM’s less flattering version of Semudera-Pasai’s role. The final section on Majapahit’s victories, with its Javanese-influenced style and the anachronistic term wayang wong (not attested before the mid-eighteenth century), may represent a later interpolation added in Java or Palembang.

Key Findings

  • The sole extant HRP manuscript (Raffles MS 67, Royal Asiatic Society, London) is dated 1814, meaning its linguistic features cannot be taken as evidence of the original composition date (p. 97).
  • Winstedt’s “archaic” words (kutaha, mangkin, bepersembahkan, etc.) all appear in seventeenth-century texts; mangkin survives into the nineteenth century in the Tuhfat ul-Nafis (p. 96).
  • The word kutaha, used by Winstedt to date the Raffles MS 18 version of the SM to 1536, also occurs several times in the Hikajat Atjeh, written during or after the reign of Iskandar Muda (d. 1636) (p. 96).
  • The term wayang wong in the HRP’s final section on Majapahit is not attested before the middle of the eighteenth century, indicating that this section is of fairly recent date (p. 105).
  • The Hikajat Atjeh contains a passage almost identical, word for word, to one in the HRP concerning Tun Beraim Bapa, leading Teuku Iskandar to conclude the HA author was familiar with the HRP (p. 104).
  • The Bustan us-Salatin states the SM was written in 1612, a date Sweeney suggests may indicate when the Achinese first became acquainted with the text (p. 104).

Conclusion

Sweeney’s definitive takeaway is that the relationship between the HRP and the SM is neither the simple one-way influence Winstedt proposed nor the reversed dependency Teeuw suggested, but a layered process in which both texts drew on shared traditions, the SM’s compiler borrowed directly from a written version of the Pasai material, and the HRP itself was subsequently revised—possibly in Acheh, possibly in Java—to respond to the SM’s narrative and to assert the continued prestige of the Semudera-Pasai line for its Acehnese heirs.

Context

  • Primary archival source: Raffles MS 67 (HRP), Royal Asiatic Society, London; comparative analysis draws on the Hikajat Atjeh (Teuku Iskandar ed., 1959), the Hikayat Seri Rama (Shellabear ed., 1917), and the Hikayat Iskandar Zulkarnain (van Leeuwen ed., 1937).
  • Historiographically, the article occupies a middle position in the Winstedt–Teeuw debate, accepting the reality of a direct textual link while rejecting both scholars’ attempts to fix a single direction of influence, and introducing the Acheh-political dimension (succession to the daulat of Semudera-Pasai) as a previously underexplored factor in the text’s transmission history.

References